'The wandering Jews' of northwest suburbs to close Hoffman Estates synagogue after more than 45 years

This year's Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services will mark the last High Holy Days for the Am Chai congregation. A precious Torah, loaned to the synagogue from its late rabbi who rescued it from concentration camp survivors in Poland after World War II, will be donated to the Illinois Holocaust Museum.

Vikki OrtizChicago Tribune

In a community room of a church in Mount Prospect, members of Am Chai Synagogue hung the Star of David banner, set up the ark and positioned rows of chairs for the hundreds of people expected to attend Rosh Hashana services that run through Tuesday in celebration of the Jewish new year.

For longtime members of the 45-year-old synagogue based in Hoffman Estates, the quick setup in the borrowed space has become as much a tradition as the High Holidays themselves. Am Chai members affectionately refer to themselves as “the wandering Jews” of the Chicago area after a lack of Jewish residents — and thus, temple members — in the northwest suburbs forced them to sell their building in 1980 and gather wherever they could.

Since then, Am Chai members have practiced their faith “L’Dor, L’Dor” — from generation to generation — attending Shabbat services, Hebrew school and High Holidays celebrations in library meeting rooms, bank basements and church halls.

But this year’s High Holidays services will be their last.

Faced with aging founding members, a shift in the way younger generations participate in organized religion and a once-expected influx of Jews to the far northwest suburbs that never materialized, Am Chai board members voted in May to dissolve their beloved synagogue. Next week’s Yom Kippur services will mark the last of the High Holidays the synagogue will celebrate. A precious Torah, lent to the synagogue by its late rabbi, who rescued it from Holocaust survivors in Poland after World War II, will be donated to the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie.

“We really did do what we could,” said Cindy Placko, Am Chai’s president, her eyes filling with tears. Placko said the decision to close the synagogue was so emotional, she had sit-down conversations with each of the founding members before the board voted. “I needed everybody to say it was OK.”

The dissolution of the synagogue is a window into the shifting religious demographics of the Chicago area, where the same number of synagogues exist today as after WWII, but in radically different locations. In the 1940s, nearly half of the Chicago area’s 140 synagogues were in the city’s North Lawndale neighborhood, with large clusters of Jews also in Hyde Park, West Rogers Park and Albany Park, according to Irving Cutler, a retired professor of urban geography at Chicago State University and author of “The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb.”

Today, the majority of Chicago’s Jewish residents live on the city’s North Side and in the northern suburbs, with only small pockets in Oak Park, Naperville, Elgin and other areas in the west, Cutler said.

“I guess it’s a long history of oppression, so they’ve learned to stick together,” he said.

Barb Henry, 70, was a newlywed when she and her husband, Neil, moved from Chicago to Schaumburg in 1971. She was attracted to the affordable single-family homes and the perception that the incoming Woodfield Mall would soon bring droves of Jewslike them. But it didn’t take long before Henry missed the sense of community she had always felt from her synagogue in the city.

By word of mouth, she connected with a handful of other Jewish families feeling the same nostalgia. Months later, Woodfield Jewish Congregation was born, with services held in the Henrys’ living room. The group hired a rabbi and looked forward to regular gatherings where they could pray, socialize and feel connected. Adults participated in Jewish traditions as their babies slept in portable cribs set up all around the perimeter, BarbHenry recalled.

“We were so young,” said Sharon Goldberg, who joined the synagogue in 1972 and quickly cherished the bonds she formed with members of the temple. “It was like we were all brothers and sisters.”

Founding members designed their synagogue with two things in mind: They wanted a place where they and their children could grow together, both in faith and in life; and they wanted equal treatment for men and women.

Eventually, Woodfield Jewish Congregation had enough members to justify renting a space, a storefront property next to a paint store in Roselle. Members furnished their synagogue with card tables and folding chairs, and closed the curtains in front windows to block out the parking lot. In 1975, 10 member families joined to guarantee a loan on their own space — a one-story, white building in Hanover Park with a large open space, adjoining classrooms and a kitchen with a stove and refrigerator.

“It looked like a box,” Placko said, but members of the congregation considered it a second home where children gathered twice each week for Hebrew school, parents came for Friday Shabbat, and women of the synagogue cooked dinner for as many as 150 members after services.

The synagogue cycled through several full-time rabbis, including Rabbi Morris Fishman, who joined in 1980. After learning of the synagogue’s struggle over the years to attract more members, he suggested changing the name to Am Chai, which means “the people live” in Hebrew.. Fishman also bestowed on the congregation a sacred Torah he had carried to the U.S. himself, after working with displaced people in Poland after WWII.

Am Chai members were moved when Fishman explained that the Torah came from Holocaust survivors in Poland who had hidden it during the war and asked Fishman to bring it to America to share its story of perseverance.

“He wanted it used, and he wanted them to be able to flourish,” said Judge Abbey Romanek, Fishman’s daughter, who is now a Cook County Circuit Court judge.

For the last 17 years, Am Chai’s main office and meeting space has been in a retirement home in Hoffman Estates. Members say the bond they felt from Am Chai helped them from feeling isolated in an area without many Jewish delicatessens, Kosher butchers or grocery aisles carrying matzo and Hanukkah candles.

“The commitment we had made us have stronger ties with the religion,” said Art Reisman, longtime choir director for the synagogue.

Although Am Chai gave up its building in 1980 because the cost to run it outweighed incoming funds, members of Am Chai promised one another that they would keep the temple alive long enough for the youngest children to have their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. In fact, they kept it running long enough for the founding members’ grandchildren to have theirs as well.

But by this year, synagogue leaders couldn’t justify keeping the temple going anymore. Some founding members had retired and split their time between the Chicago area and warmer climates. Younger generations looked to other classes, teams and activities to fill their social lives. While hundreds showed up routinely for High Holidays celebrations, weekly Shabbat attendance was sometimes as few as 7 people, Placko said.

Synagogue leaders contacted the Holocaust Museum to offer up its precious Torah from Rabbi Fishman. They were surprised to learn Fishman’s daughter, Abbey Romanek, is active on the museum’s board of directors.

Romanek said she burst into tears when museum directors told her about her father’s Torah. She remembered seeing the historic scroll as a child but had lost track of its whereabouts. The emotion deepened when she learned her father’s former synagogue was about to dissolve.

“I’m sure he would be sorry, but he also understood the — for the lack of a better term — the diaspora of the way of the Jews,” Romanek said. “It’s just kind of the way of the Jews to just sort of move on.”

In preparing for their final High Holidays celebration, Am Chai members, led by Rabbi Michael Tillman, said they were proud of the way their synagogue brought community together — not just those of Jewish faith, but of all spiritual traditions. The temple could not have continued for the last several decades without the cooperation of many local churches, which donated use of their space. The Am Chai a cappella choir, once made up only of Jews, is now half Christians, who have been welcomed into the tradition.

When Am Chai lost its building almost four decades ago, founding member Barb Henry said she sat in the back of the temple after Yom Kippur and sobbed in despair. But as she moves into the period of reflection after Rosh Hashana this week, she is bolstered by the friendship and connections she knows she will not lose.

“I’m OK. It’s time,” Henry said. “When we started the synagogue we needed each other. Like families, you grow up.”

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